Reflections, Reflections

I totally agree with what Angry in the Great White North wrote, replying to a question on Canada's new legalizing of same-sex "marriage":

"I would have to say I agree with a lot of what you write normally. However, have you overlooked the fact that a relationship between a man and a woman could be abused in the same manner under the old law?"

AGWN: Good point. But in the old days (ie, before this summer), marriage was understood by all to mean man+woman having sex and making babies. That not all couples actually did that didn't alter the meaning. The form of marriage still worked for these people who did not want to perform the function of marriage.

But to make marriage work for same-sex couples, we had to change the form of marriage itself. We had to rip out all the guts of marriage, since any mention of children made it exclusively heterosexual. When you take out children, sex becomes irrelevant too. We've hollowed out the form of marriage so that anyone can fit into it. That leads to this purely financial relationship since the new form encompasses them, whereas the old form did not. When you do that, and you look at the old laws about bigamy, you have to wonder whether the laws even make sense anymore.

---

Marriage was pulling away from the babycentric roots (easy divorce, social tolerance/acceptance of infidelity, etc), and people have been warning about that for quite some time. However, while it was still a heterosexual institution, it still was connected, however tenuously. When it morphed into a right, and the demand was made to make it apply to same-sex couples with no differences whatsoever, the only solution was to destroy what understanding remained about the function of marriage in society (a means of guaranteeing the paternity of children). Marriage was now about couples and their feelings, and no longer about children and responsibility.

Any attempt to maintain marriage as the primary socially acceptable vessel for procreation and the rasing of children would necessarily make heterosexual marriage different in nature from homosexual marriage, and that was deemed unacceptable.

Final nail in the coffin, as it were. Now that marriage is dead and buried, weird marriage zombies are on the rise, such as this straight marriage for tax reasons.